From EP-B-0 627 027 there is known a method of manufacturing and laying a plurality of elongate elements to the outside of a core element. The core element, which may be a tube or a bundle of tubes and/or cables is advanced along a feed line. The elongate elements which are metal tubes and if needed cables are fed onto outside of the core element and laid in a helix. The metal tubes as well as the cables have been coiled to drums, which drums are spaced apart around the core element and are rotatable about the core element for helical laying thereon. Rotation of the drums about the core element is slow, when long lengths of metal tubes have been coiled to the drums, as the total weight of the drums causes high centrifugal forces. Therefore this method is very slow. Another draw-back of the known method is that each metal tube has to be coiled on a drum. If the length of the metal tubes supplied by the tubemaker is much shorter than the umbilical, the needed tube length has to be produced for each conduit of the umbilical. This is a time consuming process.